Timeline set for overhaul at EOB offices

Monday, May 24, 2004 | 10:54 a.m.

Members of the board that governs the Economic Opportunity Board met with state officials Friday to hammer out a timeline for creating a new board, bringing in a temporary director and hiring someone to deal with the press, all in an effort to correct a raft of troubles plaguing the nonprofit organization.

According to a timeline prepared by the state Department of Human Resources and obtained by the Sun, the EOB dissolved its current board as of Friday.

The timeline says a new board, which temporary spokesman Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, said would include six members of the old board, must be named by June 1. Only seven members of the board attended Friday's meeting, according to board member Chester Richardson. The board is supposed to have 15 members.

The timeline also says the organization will bring in an interim director by June 14 and an outside management team paid for with federal funds by June 21.

Neal said he hoped the organization would be able to complete all the items listed on the timeline by Dec. 6.

"We would like to have all these things settled by then and get back to working and get you to stop writing about us," he said.

The meeting was a follow-up to a federally-funded review the human resources department called for based on problems with accounting for $2.1 million in child care funds.

Mike Willden, director of the department and the top state official at Friday's meeting, could not be reached for comment.

The review was done during five days in early April by a team of consultants brought in to look at the organization's board, management and fiscal operations.

The report that came out of the review pointed to a series of problems with the organization -- the Las Vegas Valley's largest nonprofit agency -- and made recommendations for solving those problems.

The report recommended bringing in an outside management team for an unspecified period of time to help review each of the organization's 30-odd programs meant to help the poor and to assist in hiring a new executive director and top-level staff. Those hires would be made between Sept. 1 and Nov. 16, according to the timeline.

In recent months, the organization has lost its executive director, assistant director, chief financial officer, and human resources director, among other key employees.

But the timeline also specifies that management team brought in to help run the organization would be the very one that did the review -- the Peer to Peer Crisis Intervention team from Mid-Iowa Community Action Inc..

"Hiring the same management team that recommended hiring a management team seems to be a conflict of interest," Richardson said. He also said the board would look into other possible groups to take on the task.

The timeline says the team would be paid for with federal funds.

Another recommendation included in the report involved "a comprehensive restructuring" of the board, to be accomplished by cutting back to "a small core of three members ... to deal with the immediate crises facing the agency ... (and) carefully rebuild itself with the addition of new members."

But the board rejected the suggestion of breaking down to three members in a May 6 special meeting and instead agreed Friday to six.

Neal said the board would decide May 26 at its regularly-scheduled meeting which six members would stay.

Richardson said that decision "is going to be a problem, if somebody doesn't want to be left out.

"That should be an entertaining scenario," he said.